hal.dll corrupted or missing

I have a dual-boot Win 7 64 and Win XP setup using EasyBCD. I installed SP3 the other night to the XP partition. It restarted just fine. Now, however, I get the good ol' "the hal.dll file is corrupted or missing." When I go in through the XP Recovery Console, I don't see either Windows installation listed, so I can't copy the file back into Windows (nor can I rewrite the boot.ini). I'm assuming that this is due to the way EasyBCD sets up partitions. But the BIGGEST problem is that when I attempt to launch from the boot disc I made when I installed EasyBCD, my drive can't read the disc! I'm here today to put whatever I need onto a flash drive and try to fix things using that, but I thought I'd post my issue in order to elicit any helpful feedback ya'll might have. Thank you!

Addendum:

It occurs to me that, given the new way Win 7 handles partitions, maybe I need to use the Console using the Win 7 install disc. Still, I would have thought both my Windows installations would be listed using EITHER disc's Recovery Console

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Thanks for the suggestion; I had printed that section of the manual but hadn't tried it yet.

I'm curious -- why run the repair off the Win 7 DVD 3 times? Also, it seems when I attempt a repair this way, nothing is really happening, even though the progress thingy is spinning. I suppose I just need to be patient?

MS seems to have designed it to fix just one thing at a time, and you might have several things to recreate. Three isn't carved in stone, you could try rebooting after each iteration to see if it works yet, but three if not necessary, is at least sufficient. (and each repair should only take a few seconds)

Terry

Baker of fine scones.

Please keep requests for help in the forums where everyone can see them, not in Private Messages.Posting a plea for help or information in the forum, will be seen more quickly by a widely experienced audience.A solution in the forum could also be useful to other future visitors, so PLEASE, no private requests. (they won't be answered !)